10 July 2014

Members of Costain’s Director 15 Talent Development Programme, together with graduates from across the Group, recently took part in a simulated business management competition.

With seven teams in total, including four from the Director 15 Programme, all entrants took part in the Preliminary Rounds of the ENGINUITY 2014 Competition for Industry, with five teams going 'head to head' in a one-day, four-round showdown at Costain’s head office in Maidenhead.

The competition gave the teams specific business tasks such as devising a strategy, identify and win new work in different sectors, expand the infrastructure of the business to achieve growth and improve profitability. The teams had to work across different countries and markets, which presented a number of risks and challenges to overcome such as client restrictions, global competition and environmental problems.

The teams’ performance was assessed based on 10 key performance indicators including operating profit, contract completions, forward workload, margin, client satisfaction and share price performance.

The eventual winners - the 'Sky Blues' - included D15 members Ros Parker as Chief Executive, Ben Howard as Operations Director and Chris Turner as Work Winning Director. The runner-up team, headed by Mohammed Shah as Managing Director, was called 'Business For Tomorrow' and was made up of non-D15 members Chris Henry as Finance Director; Ben Murray as Work Winning Director;  Amar Riaz as Operations Director and Danmi Lee as Business Performance Director.

ENGINUITY has the backing of the construction industry and was used by Costain to complement Director 15, the Company’s Talent Development Programme for emerging leaders.

Indy Lachhar, Costain’s Sustainability and Emerging Talent Manager, said the competition gave the participants an opportunity to develop their management skills and to use the core business competencies they have acquired from the Graduate Development and Director 15 Programmes, bringing it all together into running a global construction contracting business in a competitive simulated environment.

“ENGINUITY gave us a good insight and appreciation of what is required for a company to be competitive. The importance of strategy was key, targeting sustainable and profitable markets from day one and building customer relationships through repeat business. We learnt that a mitigation strategy is always required as just one poor decision can have multiple impacts across a business,” said Ros Parker, a Section Engineer on the London Bridge Station Redevelopment Project.

Mohammed Shah, a Graduate Performance Improvement Manager, added:  “Even though we just missed out on first position, we were delighted that Costain acknowledged our team effort and labelled us potential leaders for tomorrow. ENGINUITY showed us that to achieve a successful business, team work is imperative. But what it also taught us was that, without team work, we would not have got this far. I would like to say that the success of Business for Tomorrow was really down to a massive team effort where every member played a great part.”

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